Alternatively: just stop. Right now

Sometimes, you just can’t go back. Games built solely around engrossing gameplay (Pac-Man) or a core of fantastic gameplay but with added fantastic visual effects (Defender) still engage today. But for some genres, notably racing, it’s all about thrills driven by visual excitement. And if there’s one thing lacking in early 1980s C64 racers, it’s visual excitement. And thrills. (OK, two things.)

Back in the day, Pitstop II wowed. Its split-screen enabled two players to battle it out head-to-head (well, tyre-to-tyre), or for Billy no-mates to take on computer opponents. As the name suggests, Epyx were rather excited about the pitstop component, which enabled you to refuel and change worn tyres.

On playing the game now, it’s almost impossible to see it as anything other than a relic. The graphics are dull, the sound mind-numbingly tedious, and the gameplay shockingly boring. The pitstop, supposedly a high-point, is absurd in its sluggishness and just gets in the way. When it boils down to it, Pitstop II is merely a split-screen Pole Position, with an unwanted extra ‘scene’. The thing is, Pole Position is actually more fun.

Pitstop II is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (£3.50ish). You’ll also need some rose-tinted glasses, however, and those cost extra.

This is the news! Rising fuel costs slash pit team personnel!

We’ve got an emergency here

Chase HQ is like injecting the 1980s into your eyeballs. Take one very 1980s sports car (a black Porsche), a duo of American cops (one black, one white, just like in Miami Vice), sprinkle on a dash of OutRun, and bake for 40 minutes. Er, and then inject, obv., otherwise the opening line doesn’t work.

The game is great and a still somewhat rare concept: drive fast, catch your adversary and then ram their car into submission. It makes you want to wear a pastel suit, hum Crockett’s Theme and Bruce Springsteen, and grow a mullet. OK, maybe not, but it is a lot of fun, even in these days of from-every-angle pile-ups in Burnout 947.

Unfortunately, Chase HQ on Virtual Console starkly illustrates one of the platform’s major shortcomings compared to XBLA: instead of using the still rather nifty arcade original, you’re lumbered with the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 conversion. To continue our needle theme, this version is rather like injecting battery acid into your eyeballs.

The graphics are dreadful, flickery and lack animation. The controls are all over the shop. And the gameplay is less fun than kissing a rabid weasel. Even the dire NES and Master System versions would have been a step up from this, and the CPC and Spectrum releases were (and still are) miles ahead of this shambles. Avoid.

Chase HQ is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (£3.50ish), if you fancy wasting your money.

‘Criminals here,’ it says by the arrow, but the real criminals are the ones charging for this garbage. Oh yes.

It pongs. You won’t want to break it out at a party. Etc.

“It may seem familiar, but it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before!” boasts Taito about Arkanoid DS. However, this isn’t entirely true—I’ve seen plenty of half-baked Breakout games over the years.

The fact remains that Arkanoid was never that good in the first place. Stripped of its shiny graphics, it was just another in a long line of bat-and-ball games, albeit one with a few power-ups and some nice level design. Converted to home systems, it was soon bettered by a slew of contemporaries, including Krakout and Traz, with only the most devout of Arkanoid followers continuing to fly its flag.

Arkanoid DS, however, manages to stamp on even on the rose-tinted glasses of those deluded souls. Vapid layouts combine with graphics that would embarrass a Commodore 64 to make a game that appears more dated than the mid-1980s arcade original. And if you’re waiting for me to say “but at least the gameplay remains intact”, you’re going to be disappointed: of all the Breakout-oriented games I’ve played, this is one of the worst. It’s too easy, far too dull, and you tend to get stuck for ages on the ‘last brick’, something hardly helped by the play area stretching across both DS screens and yet also being extremely narrow.

If Arkanoid DS was a homebrew effort, I wouldn’t be so scornful, but this is a commercial product. And when you compare it against Space Invaders Extreme, you see just how far Arkanoid DS is from being an exciting and essential update.

Arkanoid DS is out now, if you’re interested (read: if you’re a masochist). The Japanese version also comes with a little detachable DS paddle, but the game’s still rubbish.

This is one of the best levels in Arkanoid DS. Seriously.

Or: The Penultimate Penultimate Ninja

Games these days often fall foul of the ‘gloss’ criticism—they’re very pretty, but peel away this superficial layer and they play about as well as a CD that’s been attacked by a knife-wielding maniac. But this isn’t new—in fact, even the odd 8-bit title suffered from this problem, and The Last Ninja is a case in point.

I remember the first time I played the isometric ninja ‘epic’, spurred on by reviewers falling over themselves to fawn over System 3 and heap awards and praise on the game itself. First impressions were good: the music was lovely, and the graphics were quite nice. However, as soon as I started playing, that creeping feeling set in, and I soon realised there was a slight problem: the game was rubbish. The environment was limited and the fights were borderline canned and extremely dull. Too many sections in the game demanded pixel-perfect jumps of the type Jet Set Willy had been slammed for a couple of years previously.

Two decades later and The Last Ninja has landed on Virtual Console with a splat, offering newcomers the chance to guide Armakuni (that’s the ninja) through a half-dozen or so tedious isometric levels, on his way to defeat the evil shogun, a process made even more hateful by the fact that the game’s even more fiddly to control on the Wii. The graphics aren’t that pretty these days either, but at least the music’s still good.

So: two stars for the excellent soundtrack, and minus fifty billion for the crappy controls and rubbish gameplay. Unfortunately, Revert to Saved’s rating system only goes down to 1/5, so that’ll have to do.

The Last Ninja is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (£3.50ish). Alternatively, hurl three pound coins and a 50-pence piece at a violent drunk and have him beat you up—you’ll have a much more satisfying experience.